(essay written for the group show On Drawing II at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal | this show included the following artists: AnaMary Bilbao; Matt Mullican; João Onofre; Julião Sarmento; Jim Shaw; Rui Toscano;
Lawrence Weiner; Erwim Wurm)

◊

The
most important thing about drawing may just be that at some point in
our lives we all have done it. Be it a drawing on a Canson paper or a
simple doodle on a Post-it, in a visual arts class or on a coffee table,
committed to it or just passing our time, drawing is completely
inclusive in its applications and transverses all human activity. This
means that everyone knows what is implied in the act of drawing, as if
it were an innate or ancient lore. It also means that everyone
recognizes and has some degree of domain over the innumerous protocols
adopted by drawing, and that we use to communicate, learn, project,
register, or express. Drawing has multiple uses, ubiquitous and
democratic; what may explain why it is often considered the most
intimate of the artistic mediums—one that does not lie nor keeps secrets
and that, in its directness, establishes the open, informed, and
immediate receiving field that once led Ingres to declare that 'drawing
is the probity of art.'

The exhibition now being presented at
Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art comprises all this variety of uses of
drawing and its natural impulse for denotative exchange. Between Matt
Mullican’s emotional essay and Jim Shaw’s categorical archive, we can
find drawing in the service of the cataloguing of an iconography that is
as generic as it is anchored in the codes of popular culture. The
easiness and excessive carelessness manifested by both work as leveling
mechanisms, canceling out any chance of recognizing hierarchies,
beliefs, or possibility of using them to confirm any personal framework
of values. To put everything in the same plane is also one of the
fundamental characteristics of pictogrammatic drawing. However, in Erwin
Wurm’s and Julião Sarmento’s works, drawing is just the superficial
layer of a set of advances, echoes and references that either refer to
tutelary artworks and names in Western culture or complexify previous
moments of the artists’ own paths. The graphical condition of the sign
and the metalinguistic function of the text serve radically different
purposes in the works by Lawrence Weiner and João Onofre. What in the
first is spatialization, inflection of meaning, and deducible content,
in the second is tautological depiction and operation, as if the energy
giving density and intention to Weiner’s words was polarized by Onofre,
forcing it to go back into itself and causing a circular coincidence
between what we read and what we see. Besides bringing a skillful
perceptual disruption into play, the traveling and panoramic sequences
by Rui Toscano question the traditional codes applied to landscape,
drawing our attention to the artful nature of contour—the impossible
line that signals the thin edge of things, rigorously expressed and
singularized in the works by AnaMary Bilbao.

Exactly ten years
later, this exhibition repeats the premises of On Drawing I, honing its
criteria. Despite the diversity of formats and resources used by these
artists, their artworks establish a territory permeated by a common
ideology. In the extraordinary economy of their achievements, these
pieces row against the rhetoric of the superfluous, as well against the
spurious tide of contemporary image. Fundamentally, they are exercises
in concision and acumen: the depuration of their solutions, the focused
attention of the gaze, the vague space of their intervals, the critical
backing of subjectivity.